


Punchline

by gabsrambles



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Trigger warning: suicide (Not of a major character in the story)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-24
Updated: 2016-04-24
Packaged: 2018-06-04 06:17:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6644674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gabsrambles/pseuds/gabsrambles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A bisexual, a widow and a murderer walk into a bar....</p>
            </blockquote>





	Punchline

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning: mentions of suicide. 
> 
> I´m thinking of making these into a series of ¨Clarke and Lexa get together¨ one shots, what with ¨The Rain¨ and now this...I have no idea where this one came from.  
> Thanks for reading guys, feedback always appreciated :)

 

A bisexual, a widow and a murderer walk into a bar.

No. That makes it sounds like a joke, which it isn´t, and that´s enough to make Clarke throw back three shots in quick succession and gasp, loudly, revelling in the burn that she hopes will blister away the feeling that seems to never stop scraping at her throat.

It isn´t, so she does two more.

After four, that scraping feeling doesn´t exactly go away, but it dulls to a whisper, a mild brush, and Clarke feels like maybe she can breathe again. The stool under her is biting into her coccyx and she shifts, tongue running over her lips to collect tiny bits of salt. They prickle at her taste buds. There´s chatter around her, some English, and some Czech, and some languages she doesn´t recognise. Prague is beautiful, is glittering, is full and brimming with history that she always felt her own country lacked. After walking for hours and hours, her feet aching and brain full of monuments and stone and bridges and castles, Clarke had done what she did in every city she stumbled off a train into and found a bar that was as dark and dirty as the feeling that has settled deep into her chest.

She should be at work, stitching people together and pressing them back into a shape that resembles mended, but that life seems as if it were years gone, and not one she left behind just six months ago, a one way ticket jammed into her back pocket and excuses spilling from her lips that did nothing to make her mother understand.

A bisexual, a widow and a murderer walk into a bar.

The punchline? They´re all the same person.

Prague has beer that she feels can she almost chew, that settles in her stomach rich and smooth, better than that in Germany, better than from Belgium, though she´d never say that to anyone she met there. Because of that, she has stayed an extra week, learning the maze of streets and name of the bartender she ends up near every night. He has a fish tattooed behind his ear and a smile that curves up like a wish and no English to speak off, which makes him Clarke´s favourite person in the city.

That punchline is ringing around and around her head, so she orders two more shots and doesn´t bother with condiments, hoping she can leave herself feeling nothing. Everything is fuzzy at the edges and when someone slides into a seat near her, Clarke gazes at them almost too openly. Green eyes flick to Clarke´s face and back down to the bar top, only to flick back over.

“What?” The girl asks. Not girl, woman. She can´t be much younger than Clarke´s thirty one years.

Clarke shrugs and she can feel the sloppiness and the disconnect; warmth blossoms in her chest that she´s managed to put herself into a state in which she doesn´t really feel it all anymore. That punchline is a distant memory. 

“I know you.” Clarke says.

The girl looks at her again, her eyebrows pulling together and a crease appearing between them. Clarke does know her, but this woman doesn´t know Clarke.

“I don´t think that you do.”

It´s a game Clarke could play for a while but the flicker of joy that had filled her stomach at the thought of a playful exchange deflates in her stomach to mix with the alcohol and Clarke loses interest in it.  “You´re staying in my hostel.”

This makes the woman turn slightly on her seat to look at Clarke carefully. Her eyes trace Clarke´s skin from top to bottom, as if she´s trying to see all of her and the feeling makes Clarke feel noticed, something she´s steadily sidestepped for months. It should be pleasant, but instead leaves an aftertaste of panic.

“Which hostel is that?”  There´s a challenge in her tone, as if she thinks Clarke is some kind of predator and it almost makes Clarke snort a laugh. Almost.

Clarke lets a small smirk tug at her lips as she says the name and watches the girl relax.

“ We are indeed at the same hostel.”

This girl reminds Clarke of herself, avoiding conversation, avoiding looks and knowledge of others. It makes Clarke lean forward slightly. “Clarke.”

The girl bites her bottom lip softly and Clarke has the absurd urge to lean forward and do it for her.  “Lexa.”

This Lexa isn´t off with the rest of the hostel crowd, on a bar crawl or clutching a cheap ticket to a rave in one of the underground clubs. Clarke often avoids them, except on nights the scraping at her throat settles into a clawing that invades her chest and insides, leaving Clarke ready to tear herself apart to get rid of the feeling. Those nights she finds out where the hostel has suggested to all the others and goes to any but, losing herself in the crushing of bodies and darkness invaded by strobe lights and music that vibrates in chest. She stands as close to the speaker as she can in the hopes of reverberating that clawing, choking feeling out. Most days, though, she craves solitude, the press of people suffocating, nerve wracking. On those few nights, she needs it, to suppress her nervous system and somehow leave her breathing.

“Didn´t fancy the pub crawl?”

Lexa wrinkles her nose and gives a short shake of her head. “No.” She sips her beer and Clarke waits for something else, but Lexa offers nothing.

It´s interesting, when really it should be anything but.

Her ´no´ was short, the vowel clipped, and Clarke wants to settle next to her, rub shoulders with her, the urge taking her by surprise and ending in the want to leave, to run, to not see something that offers her any form of comfort.

She doesn´t go, though.

When Clarke orders another shot, she gets two, and slides one to Lexa. Biting into the lime the bartender offered her, Lexa takes the shot like it´s water and Clarke wants to lick the juice off her chin.

An hour later, Clarke has Lexa pushed against the rough brick outside the bar, in an alley, and she doesn´t recognise herself anymore. She had never been one for fast fucks, for no feelings. She had had the soul of a healer, an artist, had married and lolled in a security that had almost been suffocating, but that had been who she thought was.

Now, she was sucking the traces of lime juice off skin that´s soft under her lips and pulling groans that are throaty and deep from the girl pressed beneath her body. Brick scraps her knuckles and her knees ache when she drops to them. It´s been so long since Clarke slept with anyone, let alone a girl, but she discovers quickly that the patterns are the same and that when you´re fuelled with alcohol and have someone´s taste on your tongue, the punchline of your life feels almost distant.

 

* * *

 

After travelling the north of Poland Clarke has fallen into Krakow by accident and fallen in love with city all at the same time. She sits in squares and eats _Koptyka_ and drinks too much wine. It rains nonstop, in sheets and sheets and she doesn´t even care that she´s soaked most of the time, the water filling her shoes and making her eyeliner run. She just stops wearing it.

There are emails piling up in her inbox and, as always, she avoids answering them and instead writes her second postcard in six months to let her mother at least know she´s alive and writes lies about no wifi. No guilt gnaws at her stomach, or perhaps there is so much there already she doesn´t notice the extra company.

It´s been three and a half weeks since Clarke left Prague behind, and she tries not to think of the girl she left in the alley with tears on her cheeks, or the fact that since Clarke allowed someone even a little close to her, loneliness has crept in and settled in her bones.

She ignores it.

The bar she has found for this city is deep underground. She stumbles across it by accident. The stairs go down twenty deep and she followed winding stone passages before she went down another ten to end up in a bar clearly filled with locals and a haven from tourists. Still, no one looked at her strangely and when she slid into a booth, the bartender brought her a tray of different vodkas to drink and Clarke quickly discovers that the alcohol here barely leaves a hangover.

When she sits with her back against the stone and feet up on the bench seat, shot glass rolling between her fingers, Clarke can close her eyes and wonder what went on in this room a year ago. Twenty years, hell, five hundred. The stone is rough under her head and the feeling of Prague is enough to make her swallow hard, then swallow the vodka even harder.

The bartender is another of Clarke´s favourite people, to be added to the fairly short list she has made this trip. The only people on them are the bringers of alcohol, the only ones she could consider friends. He stumbles over English with a smile that bumbles as well, and Clarke offers him one of her own and she discovers quickly, also, that he secretly loves having someone not local in his bar.

It smells softly of mildew, of age, of damp and Clarke supposes she should choke on the smell a little but instead it suits her. She marinates in the thought that her insides feel like that, feel like ages, feel like mildew, like something rotten inside of her. That old joke rises in her, tickles at her tongue, but she swallows it down.

She doesn´t like being the punchline to her own horrendous joke.

That thought makes her gasp, makes her swallow heavily and she drops handfuls of Zloty on the table, far more than she owes, and walks up the stairs, so narrow her shoulders brush the side as she sways a little. When she bursts outside her cheeks are slapped with cold and it feels like mercy, like a blessing, and she swipes angrily at her eyes, dry and stinging. By now she knows to walk up and turn left on the second street, then take a right to be in a park with a pond. The park is full, it´s early evening, and the sky is clear for the first time the entire week she´s been there. Stars scatter above like dropped dreams and music floats near her, the sound of a violin and a cello deep and dark. She feels she could float. Float up and up and disappear amongst the drops of light overhead, some part of her tugged to them as if she´d been between them once before.

It´s easier to breathe, suddenly, and Clarke´s head is still hazy, the vodka swimming in her veins. She pauses near the two musicians and something inside her cracks when she sees who is playing the cello.

The woman from the bar, from Prague, who Clarke fractured open and left behind as she splintered herself is lost to the notes she drags out, her fingers long and tapered, pulling a melody Clarke doesn´t recognise. She wants to run, to leave, to flee. It´s too strange, yet not strange, to find someone you´ve seen before in a country that is new under your feet. When the last note wavers out and the small crowd of people clap, Clarke turns to go, but not before her eyes catch those of Lexa´s and everything in her grows cold.

This is not what she fled to Europe to do.

But still, she stops mid turn and turns back, her eyes heavy on the woman as she packs her cello in her case and shakes hands with the man with the violin. For some reason, he takes the cello. Lexa steps forward empty handed to stand in front of Clarke.

“Are you staying in my hostel, again?”

A smile twitches at Lexa´s lips and Clarke remembers how they sucked at her own, how desperate they´d been as they´d lost themselves to a kiss that had been far too drunk and far too painful.

Clarke shakes her head. “I was just…walking.”

“The world is far too small.”

“It is.”

Lexa cocks her head and studies her. “You are drunk, again.”

That same accent tugs at Lexa´s words and Clarke feels curiosity, sudden and unexpected, bloom.

“I have had some vodka.”

“Good. The vodka is good in Poland.”

Lexa turns, turns to go, Clarke thinks, turns to walk away, and Clarke should let her but instead asks, the words perhaps falling a little too desperately, “Then do you want to have some? With me?”

Clarke will never understand why, but Lexa stops. She turns and nods. “Okay.”

Hours later, they stumble through the doors of the apartment Clarke found on airbnb, and this time they fall onto the softness of a mattress that creaks slightly, no harsh brick to tug Clarke out of the moment. Their hands are hard and desperate though, and Clarke groans into a hot mouth, her nails scraping at ribs as if she can pull the heart out Lexa, pull it out and tug it into herself, leaving the other woman splayed out for Clarke to inspect. There is nothing soft about their touches, the hard curving of fingers and hands, but when Clarke comes, it´s gentle, as if her body is defying what her mind calls for and giving her something she didn´t even know she needed.

It´s her last night in Krakow, and the first time Clarke has let someone touch her since her husband last did.

 

* * *

 

In Budapest Clarke discovers they have clubs built into old warehouses, old buildings, in places that are such a fire hazard that to party in them is to flirt with an end. So Clarke does it, because those nights in which the thing in her claws has reared up and she has nothing to sate them with but the vibration of music and the movement of her body to the sound. For a week she sleeps all day and goes out all night and lives in darkness struck through with flashing light. There are clubs underground that are one enormous room, the rock walls surrounding them all sweating history and rebellion. There are rooms upon rooms, converted apartment buildings, rooms that only fit a maximum of fifty people in each but each with their own DJ, their own bartender almost throwing drinks at the crows. Bikes hang from ceilings, plants crawl between the brick, languages meld together and fly into the night, unimportant when all anyone wants to do is dance.

Her body, exhausted and protesting, feels ready to give in at the end of the week and Clarke, on a whim, goes back to Austria. She had only been in Vienna a few months ago, but this time her train pulls into Salzburg. When she steps out, it´s into a heavy fog and into a beauty that steals her breath. She finds another apartment and spends her days wandering the river, the tiny streets, climbing to the top of a huge hill to walk around a fortress.

The mountains surround them, the Alps, snow-capped and awe inspiring and only rarely peeping out from the cold fog and rain. In those moments the mist creeps away and the green and white jumps out, Clarke´s chest opens and she can remember a time before everything hurts, but that makes everything hurt even more. Makes it ache.

One day, she sits in a cold chair, the light that has somehow found its way out from behind a cloud warming the crown of her head. She grapples with her bag, rifles through it, fingers desperate and a feeling welling up she thought was dead. There´s a shake to her fingers, to her hands, to her entire body, an anxiety welling at the deep seated _need_ that´s in her. All she can find is a crumpled piece of paper that’s advertising a cheap place to eat. But the back is empty and white, a haven. She finds a pen and on that seat, a river stretched out in front of her and mountains looming over a town, she puts the pen to paper and lets the images spill out.

It´s like a torrent, a wave, a flood. She´s rusty, but she doesn´t care. The paper is inundated with small details. A gate in the corner, a bridge in the middle, a mountain pressed into the side. The couple a bench over are clasping hands, and Clarke sketches their hands, time pressing down against their skin and indents them with the desperation she can see in their grip. In the bottom corner, there are eyes that appear, eyebrows that press together, perplexed, an indent between them as if moulded there by constant misunderstanding. It makes Clarke´s pen pause for the first time in hours, hover over them, her eyes scanning the river. The couple are gone, she´s alone, and Clarke realises she knows those eyes are green, when her biro is black.

She crumples the paper up and buries it in her bag, pushes it down as far as it can go. But that night, the fire lit in the tiny flat, she finds a pad of paper and can´t stop herself from drawing more. Something is pushing at her throat as she leaks out image after image, pages scattered around her where she sits cross-legged on the floor. The final page is filled with other eyes, deep and dark and filled with a look she hadn´t known was as lost as it had been. There´s his face, soft, young, as it had been when they met. His cheeks, smooth, always smooth. His cheekbones, carved as he got older. There´s his neck, muscled, a place she loved to leave her lips but covered by that rope she´d found him hanging from.

Finn had been lost to her, but also to himself.

That feeling pushing at her throat bursts and Clarke swallows it down, swallows the sobs as she pushes every last piece of paper into the fire.

 

* * *

 

Innsbruck is much like Salzburg, but somehow prettier. The prices are hugely inflated, especially after so much time further east, but Clarke spent years being responsible and has enough savings to do this as long as she wants.  Especially after selling the house.

When she wanders through to the hostel kitchen, she wonders if Finn would have laughed at her joke.

A bisexual, a widow and a murderer walk into a bar.

She thinks he may have. He always had a dark sense of humour—when she had first met him, she thought him full of light, full of a desperate need to fix the world. But then his darker humour had leaked out, his darker self. Maybe she should have questioned that, the black humour. One of the thousands of things she thinks she should have questioned since that hideous day a year ago.

The hostel is warm, the heating misting the windows, and Clarke debates finding a store to buy supplies. Since the night in Salzburg she can´t stop herself drawing, the pictures and feelings building up until she wants to explode with the urge, the need, to put them to paper to see what they form. She´s covering everything in images.

When she enters the kitchen she stops and laughs. How can she not?

Green eyes dart up to look at hers, widen, then Lexa laughs at the table while an exhausted group of backpackers stare at them from where they´re clustered around a box of cereal.

The laughter feels strange, feels foreign, something Clarke should be used to since she´s encased herself in everything unfamiliar, but it takes her by surprise. Once upon a time she´d loved to laugh.

Something in Clarke still tugs at her to leave the woman alone. But three times are a weird coincidence and another part of her wants to find out more. Once she was never someone for one night stands, for sex with strangers, but that first night in an alley was the only one that echoed that feeling, the last time in the apartment in Krakow something less destructive, but still lacking any intimacy. Lexa had known what Clarke was and left in the early hours of the morning, no plans on her tongue for an itinerary, for more.

Or maybe Lexa is what Clarke is.

They wander the tiny town all day and eat pretzels warm from the cart. They speak in fits and bursts, unsure of each other and themselves. Lexa is from Germany, a tiny village in the south, and travelled Australia for two years after university, her accent a melding of cultures. Clarke likes the way she tells her small details only when Clarke presses. She likes the seriousness that sits in Lexa´s eye, and likes the fact that in all the hours they walk around, they really barely speak at all. They find a bar reminiscent of Prague and sit on uncomfortable stools. They drink _Palinka_ , a drink Clarke thought she had seen enough of in Budapest, laced with apricot and that night, Lexa doesn´t stay in her dorm, but in the private room Clarke has splurged on.

Bare bodies press together, sweat cooling on their skin, Clarke clutches Lexa back to her when she goes to leave, her head still fuzzy and the taste of fruit still on her lips. She´s surprised at her actions, but even more surprised when Lexa acquiesces, pressing against her, legs sliding together in the darkness.

“It's a very small world.” Lexa murmurs the words against Clarke´s sternum. Clarke hums her response. “Are you travelling with a purpose?”

A purposeful destination or a life purpose? Clarke travels to run, to escape, to hide. She knows that. So she chooses to answer the first one. “No. Do you?”

Her lips brush Lexa´s hair when she speaks, the smell of citrus lingering in it, sweet and tangy, fresh.

“I travel with my cello, I busk. I earn enough that way.”

“Enough to what?”

“To live how I need.”

There´s something there, something that makes Clarke wonder if Lexa has an echo of Clarke´s own darkness.

“Clarke?” Clarke could live to hear her name said like that. “What do you run from?”

And there, the sound of the heating rumbling behind her head, with skin pressing against her and the heavy feeling of being sated in her limbs, Clarke manages an answer. “Everything I did.”

“What did you do?” Lexa´s voice is hoarse, is low.

“I failed my husband.” Clarke doesn´t have the strength then, to say how, to put words to how she missed signs, she missed everything. “And then, six months later, I failed a patient.”

Lexa´s question goes unsaid, but Clarke can still hear it. She drags in a breath, and it feels like force, it shudders in her lungs.

“I killed a patient. I was exhausted, working too much, grieving too much. Or maybe too little. I gave him too much of a certain medication. I…I quit, after that.”

Tears are hot and slick on her cheeks, something she can´t force down this time, so Clarke rolls, rolls them so she´s over Lexa, her knees either side of her hips and presses her mouth to hers. She doesn´t want to hear what Lexa has to say to that, and Lexa doesn´t try to say anything anyway, just lets Clarke tug her hand between Clarke´s legs and gives her what she needs, unquestioned.

Hours later, again, Lexa´s front is pressed against Clarke´s back and she whispers in her ear, “One night, years ago, I was too tired to be driving. But my girlfriend was asleep and I didn´t want to wake her to take over. I should have. I wish every day I did. I collided with a tree and Costia died instantly, and so did something in me.”

Clarke rolls over again, her eyes searching through the dim light to see Lexa´s shimmering, and gives her what Lexa has just given her.

Peace.

 

* * *

 

For months, they choose a place on the map by taking it in turns to close their eyes and place their fingers on it. Whether they went before or not doesn´t matter, because now they experience it differently anyway. They like Serbia, learning that the coffee is to die for. In Turkey they haggle the prices of scarves and clothes, smoking too much and delighting in crossing the river to stamp their passports to say they have been to Asia. Both of them fall in love with Bulgaria, staying for weeks and exploring the coast as the weather warms and eating until neither can move. At some point, they end up in Croatia and stay on an island for weeks, Lexa tanning and Clarke freckling and tanning, the taste of salt a constant. At night, wherever they are, they trace fingers over skin, map the constellations on their bodies. Clarke learns the feel of tattoos under her lips and they sleep as if in a single bed, no matter where they are: wound together and nothing between them.

In Italy, they find the smallest fishing village they can that still does a good tourist trade and hire a room for a month. It´s warm, turning hot, their skin sticky and the smell of the sea is addictive to them both. Clarke sits by the water along the pier and sells sketches and does portraiture. They both start to pick up some of the language, the words stuttering in Clarke´s mouth as they flow out of Lexa´s like rain. The sound of cello etches itself into Clarke´s muscles, nestling into the fibres and brewing in her marrow.

At the end of the month, they pay for another, and Clarke picks up a phone and calls her mother.

When she picks up, Clarke asks if she can tell her a joke. “A bisexual, a widow and a murderer walk into a bar. They stay there. And I walk out.”

She can hear her mother´s sob of relief over the phone.

#

**Author's Note:**

> _I tumble[here](http://gabs-88.tumblr.com/), feel free to stop by and ramble at me, ask questions, say hi or whatever._


End file.
